Whenever one of our agents completes a real estate transaction, Rainmaker Properties donates a portion of the commissions to a charity of our client’s choice. For me, it’s always an enriching experience and I learn about new groups in our community that are working to help others.
A couple weeks ago, my team helped a client sell her townhouse located in the Mountain View Park development in the Whisman Mountain View neighborhood and my client asked me to make a donation to the Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties. I wasn’t familiar with it, and the 35-year-old group invited me to take a tour of their San Carlos warehouse (the smaller of two warehouses, the other one located in San Jose). It turned out to be an eye-opening and touching visit for me.
Thanks to the experience, I found that hunger is really a hidden tragedy in our community. You can usually tell if someone is poor. Or if someone is homeless. But you can’t see hunger. This really got me to think about how I can often take for granted the ability to have a almost any type of meal at anytime of the day.
Second Harvest is the largest nonprofit provider of food to low income households in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties, and it provides food to an average of 163,000 individuals each month. Families make up 67 percent of the recipients and 12 percent are seniors.
Those are pretty shocking numbers. Even though we live in solidly middle class environment, there are so many people who have to make the choice between paying for housing and utilities or buying food. And with the economy in flux, even more people are feeling pinched.
Though Second Harvest gets donations from large food distributors, it relies heavily on regular people like us too to stay afloat. Its programs go beyond the traditional food pantry.
One is a toll-free hotline, with a multilingual staff, that helps people find food in their neighborhood; another provides food to more than 400 non-profit agencies that run soup kitchens, rehabilitation centers, schools and shelters for victims of domestic violence.
And yet another program helps approximately 12,600 low-income seniors and disabled people through weekly grocery deliveries. Volunteers also deliver food to the homebound.
The group works to get nutritious snacks to low-income kids during after-school, summer, and youth programs. And during the summer, when kids don’t have access to subsidized school meals, Second Harvest helps local soup kitchens and agencies feed approximately 20,000 children.
So if you’re looking for volunteer opportunities or a place to donate food or money, Second Harvest is terrific group. I’m going to add it to the list of charities I support, and with the help of Second Harvest, Rainmaker Properties will be doing a food drive during the holidays this year.
For more information, here’s the contact information: Second Harvest, www.2ndharvest.net, (408) 266-8866. If you know of anyone who needs food assistance, call the Food Connection Hotline: 1-800-984-FOOD (3663).
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